It is well known that oil field borehole evaluation may be performed by wireline conveyed instruments following the completion of the process of drilling a borehole. Such techniques have been available to the oil field industry for decades. Unfortunately, wireline investigation techniques are frequently disadvantageous due to their nature which requires that they be performed a substantial time after drilling and after the drill pipe has been removed from the borehole. Additionally, while the wireline techniques are effective in determining formation parameters, they are unable to provide insight into the borehole drilling process itself.
In response to the shortcomings of wireline investigations, techniques which perform measurements while the borehole is being drilled are receiving greater acceptance by the oil field industry as standard, and indeed on occasion, indispensable services. Many such techniques differ from the traditional wireline techniques in that the MWD techniques are able to measure drilling parameters which not only provide information on the drilling process itself but also on the properties of the geological formations being drilled. Due to the relatively recent increased use of many MWD techniques, the oil field industry is still in the process of learning from experience how to most effectively utilize the new information that is becoming available from MWD. Perhaps not surprisingly, accumulating experience is revealing some rather unexpected results that may significantly improve the knowledge and efficiency of the process of forming boreholes in the earth.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,627,276, entitled Method For Measuring Bit Wear During Drilling by Burgess and Lesso, which is assigned to the assignee of the present invention and which is hereby incorporated by reference, proposed techniques for determining an index indicative of bit efficiency from surface and downhole derived drilling parameters. It also proposed techniques for generating an index indicative of the flatness of the teeth of the drill bit. These indices have proven invaluable in assisting in the drilling of a borehole since they enable the driller to determine in real time the condition of the bit and its efficiency in "making hole".
Unfortunately, the described techniques, while encountering success in many downhole conditions, are less effective in some other downhole conditions. Specifically, the techniques described in the above mentioned patent function best in argillaceous (shaley) formations. Through additional experience gained by numerous applications of the techniques in the drilling of boreholes, the discovery has been made that it is not always evident to the driller whether the drill bit is in an argillaceous formation that is exhibiting changing properties as the bit advances through the formation or whether the bit is encountering a lithological change from the argillaceous formation to one in which the described technique is less effective, such as sandstone or limestone. A downhole MWD natural gamma ray instrument may be of assistance in distinguishing between sandstone and argillaceous lithologies. This information is not available in real time at the location of the bit however. Typically, MWD sensors are positioned in the drill string at some distance from the bit so that, while the natural gamma ray is frequently used to distinguish sands from shales, this ability only comes into effect at some time after the bit has generated the formation, which is frequently too late.
It is, therefore, clearly desirable to identify the kind of formation being drilled, as it is being drilled, in order to enable the driller to determine whether the information derived by way of the prior art indexes of bit efficiency and dimensionless tooth flat adequately describe the current drilling conditions. It has not heretofore been evident how to distinguish between changing lithologies and a formation of the same lithology that is exhibiting a change in a "hardness" property.